


Dry Grass & Shadows

by cygnes



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 11:57:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13270971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: Another turn of the wheel. Moments in the early life of Rosalind Deschain.





	Dry Grass & Shadows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> Meant to be a Yuletide treat, but I finished a little late! Happy 2018, buddy.
> 
> Also, thanks to [scioscribe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe) for consulting with me on Roland's name (and ultimately, wisely, leading me back to the one I started with).
> 
> Full warnings in endnote, but be advised that the fic starts with a scene relating to miscarriage and includes a brief description of a miscarried fetus.

Rosalind is not Steven Deschain’s only child by Gabrielle Verriss, but she’s the only one who lives. She finds out when she's nine that she had a little brother for all of three days before he died. She had been too young herself to understand it at the time. Too young even to understand that her mother was sick, though she was: weakness of the body after the birth, low spirits for months after the death. That's another thing Rosalind finds out when she's nine, when her mother loses something that would have been a child in a few more months. She sees the crumpled red thing wrapped in a rag. It looks more like a baby mouse than a real baby. Tiny, curled over. The maid who finds her holding it makes a horrified sound. 

“I came to see my mother,” Rosalind says. And she did, she just went into her mother's bath chamber to wash up first, because there are pipes here that will still bring hot water, and all they have down in the barracks is a well with a hand-pump. And then there had been the red thing in a heap of rags, the bathtub still half-full and likewise bloody. “Is she alright?” 

“The magician’s with her,” the maid says when she finds her voice. She sounds breathless, like she's afraid to let out the air from that gasp. Like she might deflate entirely. “We’ve sent for a doctor. I don't know that you should see her like this. Beg your pardon for saying so.” The maid dips a distracted and lopsided bow. 

Rosalind’s father won't be home for days yet. Maybe a week. “I won't stay long,” she says. She realizes she's still holding the not-baby and puts it back on the floor next to the tub. The floor is done in painted tile from somewhere far away — Kashamin, maybe, or Garlan. It's cool under her hands. Smooth. The maid doesn't try to bar her way when she stands back up. She gets the door open and goes no further. 

Morgan Broadcloak faces her, eyes furious and hair unbound. She looks like a madwoman. Behind her, Rosalind can see her mother's bed, but the curtains around it are drawn closed. 

“Get out of here, girl,” the magician says in a low voice. 

“She's my mother,” Rosalind says. Her own voice is unsteady, and she's ashamed of that. A gunslinger must be commanding. 

“For all the good it's done her,” Morgan says, and darts forward. Rosalind steps back without thinking. The door slams in her face. 

She doesn’t try to go back until her father has come home. By then, her mother can sit in a chair by the window and talk to them both calmly. By then, she is visited by her friends, too: Matilda Allgood, called Sweet Matilda, and Ada Johns, and Maggie Ritter. Other women flit in and out, moths drawn to the little flame of feminine suffering, but those three are her near-constant companions. Matilda was born far away, in the mountains, and loves Gabrielle fiercely as the first and best friend she has made in Gilead. Ada has lost children of her own — Rosalind knows this because Alain has told her. Maggie and Gabrielle are friends because they share something no other women of their generation do. They are the only mothers with daughters, not sons, in the barracks.

When Steven and Rosalind pay their call, Matilda is cursing softly over a lap-loom, trying to untangle a nest of wool. Maggie is laughing at her and Ada is trying not to. Even Gabrielle manages an unsteady smile.

“I was practically raised on horseback!” Matilda says. “I never sat still long enough to get the hang of it.” 

“That much is clear,” Ada says. She notices Steven and Rosalind first. She doesn’t stand, as she might on a more formal occasion, but she folds her hands in her lap and nods. “Sai Deschain,” she greets him. Matilda looks up from her work, startled. Rosalind thinks she sees a flash of anger there, hot and dark. Something like what she saw in the magician’s face. But it passes, and Sweet Matilda does not look like a madwoman. 

Steven plants his foot and bows over it. On other occasions, that might have made the ladies laugh. He knows his reputation for formality; his only attempts at humor in mixed company depend on it. No one laughs today. His wife’s friends regard him coolly. 

“Would you like us to leave, sai?” Maggie says. Her tone suggests that this question has a correct answer and that answer is _no_. Steven obliges her, shaking his head.

“I only wanted to pay a call,” he says. “And it’s been weeks since Rozy saw her mother.” 

“Weeks since Aileen did, too,” Maggie says, half to herself. The gaze she turns on Rosalind is a little warmer. “Remember me to her, won’t you, my dear?” Rosalind nods. She and Aileen bunk side-by-side in one corner of the barracks, curtained off. It wouldn’t do for them to distract the boys. So it’s said. 

Gabrielle has eyes only for her daughter. She stares fixedly, with a sorrow that makes Rosalind want to shiver. Rosalind stands still, though. Her mother should see that she’s learning discipline and self-control.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” Steven says. His wife doesn’t look at him. “But I understand that you were well looked-after.” 

“Yes,” Gabrielle says. “My friends are very good to me. And there was a doctor. I don’t remember his name, but I suppose he was good to me, too.” She gestures shortly at herself. _Here I am_ , her gesture says, _here is your proof_.

“I came to see you,” Rosalind says. She knows immediately that she shouldn’t have spoken. The brittle calm of her mother’s expression cracks. 

“When?” Gabrielle says. 

“When you were ill,” Rosalind says. “The magician sent me away.” 

“I thought I heard your voice,” Gabrielle says. She looks away. “In a dream.” She looks at her husband then, suddenly steady. “Morgan Broadcloak saved my life.” 

“She doesn’t credit herself so highly,” Steven says. “But I’m glad she was here to help.” 

(That might be the beginning of it. Later, on the road to Hambry, Rosalind will think on it and come to no conclusion. That might have been the beginning of it, or it might not have started until later.)

Steven sits Rosalind down after the visit and tells her about her dead brother. That had been the true start of Rosalind’s life. Before that baby died, Rosalind was like any other well-born girl in Gilead. After, when the midwife said there might not be any more children, Rosalind was Steven Deschain’s presumed heir, and that was something different. An heir to the Deschain name must be a gunslinger. And that had been difficult, too. There hadn’t been a woman who carried hard calibers in the name of the Affiliation within living memory. The case was argued through historical examples: women like Ellen Water, who fought by Arthur Eld’s side. It was less the power of precedent than the power of his name that decided the matter in Steven Deschain’s favor. And so little Rozy went from the nursery to the barracks without knowing just how strange it was. 

By nine, though, she’s getting some idea. Aileen Ritter had come a few months after Rosalind, on the strength of her example. The boys their age, in their own ka-tel, are starting to tease and worse. The older boys ignore them, sure that they won’t ever earn their guns anyway, but the ones they’re routinely besting know better. They know enough to get defensive. Little good it may do them.

Cort is harder on Rosalind than the boys, and harder on Aileen than Rosalind. He doesn’t want to be accused of favoritism on account of family connections. 

“Twice the work for half the credit,” Aileen says. Her hands are in a bucket of cold water so the knuckles won’t swell. Cort had hit her hard over the backs of her hands for poor form in her stance. She has a smudge of dirt on one cheek. 

“If I cut my hair, would you help me?” Rosalind says. 

“If you cut your hair, I’d have to cut mine, too,” Aileen says. She takes her hands out of the bucket and shakes them. They’re still damp when she goes for her knife. “But I’ll do it for you, just the same.” The knife isn’t very effective, so they have to go looking for scissors, Rosalind with her badly-cut hair under a kerchief. 

Cort’s reaction the next morning is worth it. He looks at the two of them, shorn like new lambs, with something like faint approval. As though this is a grand symbolic gesture. As though they have set aside girlish vanity once and for all. Aileen keeps her chin up. Her eyes are hard and proud, even though it wasn’t her idea. _Easier to keep out of the way,_ Aileen says to the gawping boys. _Less time braiding it every morning._ This is sensible. Rosalind’s own reasoning, which she hadn’t shared, seems foolish in comparison. She thought it would help if she looked more like her father.

Rosalind and Aileen’s hair has not grown enough to need more cutting by the time they stand under the gallows where Hax the cook hangs, thanks in part to their testimony. Out of their fathers’ sight, they hold hands as they break bread for the crows. At a distance, they might be any curious children. Anyone’s daughters. Anyone’s heirs.  
___

It’s only natural that Gabrielle Deschain should spend her time with Morgan Broadcloak in her husband’s absence. They’re the two women who know him best. His wife and his advisor. He is the link between them. So it’s said and so it should be.   
___

Rosalind has known Cuthbert Allgood all her life, or more properly all _his_ life, since he’s two months younger. Their mothers are good friends. He has been her occasional ally in the barracks; he’s the one who watched her train David, as Aileen is less interested in falconry. He’s clever, even if his mouth sometimes runs a bit ahead of his brain, and he teases her only in the way he teases the other boys. She considers him a friend. When they’re both fourteen, he asks her to marry him.

“Not now, of course,” Cuthbert says. “But when we’re older and we’ve both got our guns.” It’s not a bad idea, in principle. Rosalind can’t imagine being married to someone who isn’t a gunslinger. She can’t imagine finding a man content to be left at home while she rides out. (She can’t imagine respecting a man who would be content that way.)

“Why me?” Rosalind says. “Why not Aileen?” Aileen is prettier than Rosalind. Even short-haired and in trousers, Aileen is a beauty. Rosalind isn’t bad-looking, but she’s too tall and too angular to be called pretty. Aileen is more worldly, too, for whatever that’s worth. When the boys made nasty comments about what was (or wasn’t) hidden behind their curtain, Aileen had responded by belting out three verses of a bawdy ballad called “Queen Rowena’s Pearls.” That had shut them up. And it had impressed some of them, too. These points of comparison don’t usually bother Rosalind, as Aileen is her closest friend. Here and now, though, she finds herself wanting.

“Why _would_ I ask Aileen?” Cuthbert says. “She’s fine, but she’s not…” he trails off, considering, then gives up, which is unlike him. “Your mother and my mother are friends. It would make them happy.”

“Would it make you happy?” Rosalind says. 

“Would it make _you_ happy?” he echoes back at her. She doesn't know. It wouldn't make her unhappy, as far as she can tell. Maybe that's the best someone like her can hope for.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Rosalind says. Cuthbert looks relieved. 

“We’ve got years yet,” he says. (Only they don't. Rosalind will have her guns before the day is out.) “Just something to keep in mind, before we’re out on the road and all the handsome lads we meet start throwing themselves at you.” 

“They won't,” Rosalind says. She's an oddity, not a prize.

“Their loss,” Cuthbert says. 

Rosalind kisses him on the cheek. He kisses her back on the lips, close-mouthed. Rosalind leaves Cuthbert sitting on the steps outside. She thinks about children and the making of them. Whose heirs would they be? Hers or his? Allgoods, Deschains — another matter that will have to be puzzled out and fought over, between the two of them and in open court. Between Rosalind and whoever she marries, assuming she does. And then there's the thought, cruel but practical, that Cuthbert might not be after marriage at all. He might only be after the kind of understanding that will get him into her bed (or a bed in a rented room with her, more like) in the meantime. She’d like to think better of him than that. She doesn’t know if she should.

Cuthbert will need permission from her father, if he means to go through with it, and that will be hard to come by. Steven Deschain has said he thinks Cuthbert talks too much and without enough forethought. It’s not untrue, but what he _means_ is that Cuthbert takes after his mother. There’s more of Sweet Matilda in him than Handsome Bob. Matilda is too clever by half, and worse, she’s not from Gilead. Not from Affiliation territory at all. Robert Allgood had come back from travels undertaken under the city’s auspices with a laughing woman riding her own horse beside him, cross-saddle. She is not Steven Deschain’s idea of a good woman. 

Morgan Broadcloak is stranger than Matilda Allgood, but she has an excuse. She’s supposed to be strange. She’s supposed to awaken ancient machines, to see across miles and wheels in mirrors and bowls of water. To Steven Deschain, she is something less and more than a woman. She’s not a rival, the way a man could be, or someone to be desired. And to Rosalind — an object of fascination and terror. The only woman among her father’s advisors, with a tendency to stand in corners and speak only when it’s most cutting.

Rosalind has spoken to Morgan only rarely since seeing her that red day in her mother’s chambers. Once, after a lesson on the line of Eld with Vannay, to ask if her name was a proper name or a title. _On account of Arthur’s sister, who went West with Nimue and was accounted a great magician_ , Rosalind had said. Morgan had smiled archly. _Not as dull as you’re accounted, then,_ was her answer. Or the lack thereof. And she overheard something the magician said to her father, that she still only half-understands: _You know I can navigate by Old Mother as well as by Old Star, sai, and I’ll stand up for the courting dance with your wife if it would please you._ Rosalind had snuck into the Hall of Grandfathers to see if it would happen, and it did. Morgan and Gabrielle swept across the floor in a whirl of long skirts and dark hair to a wave of laughter and clapping, a small spectacle among the other couples under the filament-lights. Rosalind had felt a strange longing. She had never learned to dance. 

Rosalind is not surprised so much as unnerved to find Morgan in her mother’s rooms now. They’re often together, after all, but Rosalind feels as though her thoughts of Morgan have summoned her. She looks like something that blew in on the wind. Her hair is in disarray and her skirts are crumpled, but her gaze is perfectly cool. Like a magpie, maybe, with a bright jewel in its clutches. 

“Come in,” Morgan says magnanimously, as though Rosalind needs to be invited. “Here to seek your mother’s counsel, I should think. Is it matters of the heart?”

Gabrielle’s hair is out of its plaits and hangs around her face like a dark cloud. Her dress is in order, but not the right kind for this time of day. Not a dress for receiving calls in, even calls from lady friends. A dress for the early morning, modestly cut but loose-fitting, to be worn alone or in the company of her husband. She looks at Rosalind tiredly and smiles a little rueful smile before looking away. Morgan stands behind her. 

“How are you, Rozy? My dear.” Gabrielle’s voice is faint and sad. “How are your studies?”

“She thinks well but slowly,” Morgan answers before Rosalind can. “Or so says Vannay. But that’s not what she’s here to talk about.” 

“What, then?” Gabrielle says. She turns her head and Morgan lays a hand on the soft bare skin of her neck. 

“Your sweet girl is old enough to wonder about matters of the heart,” Morgan says. She smiles at Rosalind, condescending or conspiratorial. “Or matters of the flesh, at least. It won’t be long now. How old were you when you married?” 

“You know that,” Gabrielle says. 

“Does Rozy? Does she know that you were bartered away before you were seventeen? How lucky she is to escape that noose around her neck. How foolish she is to want it anyway.” 

“Stop,” Gabrielle says. “Please.” She looks at Rosalind again, pleading. “I beg you, forgive us for speaking so in front of you. Sai Broadcloak and I were just having a disagreement and she hasn’t forgiven me yet. You know how friends are.” Aileen has never been cruel to Rosalind. Unkind, sometimes, but not cruel. 

“We wouldn’t disagree if you’d only see things my way,” Morgan says, leaning down to murmur in Gabrielle’s ear. Rosalind has not yet spoken but this moves her to it.

“You shouldn’t call her sai,” she says. Morgan and her mother both look at her. “Mother, she’s _beneath_ you. And even if she weren’t — if you’re friends, you shouldn’t have to.”

“See, my dear. So wary of being too familiar that you overshot the mark in the other direction,” Morgan says. The hand on Gabrielle’s neck finds its way into her hair and nests there. Not pulling. Not yet. 

“Don’t touch her,” Rosalind says. “Take your hands off her.”

“Rozy,” Gabrielle says, dismayed. 

“You don’t need your mother’s advice,” Morgan says. “Your body will tell you what you need to know. You’ll let him touch you if you’re wet for him, whoever he is, and that’s the end of it.”

Out in the hall, even through the door, Rosalind hears the slap of skin on skin, and then of flesh on stone. Morgan has hit her mother hard enough to throw her from her chair. She can see it in her mind’s eye. More than anything, more than life, she wants to kill the magician. There’s nothing she can do now, though. She has no magic. She’ll need to earn her own means of revenge.

Rosalind sacrifices David for her guns, and Cort too, though she won’t know until later. (She thinks then that he will be on his feet again in another day or so.) She takes her ‘prentice guns from the armory but does not go to the barracks for young gunslingers who have passed their trial. She goes to the curtained-off corner and the bed where she has slept almost every night of her life. She keeps the guns on her belt as she presses her hand between her legs, over her trousers but hard enough to feel it. She comes to the thought of a putting bullet through Morgan Broadcoak’s eye and then falls hard into sleep.  
___

“We could say we’ve eloped,” Cuthbert says, a little too lightly, on the road to Mejis. 

“Cousins,” Rosalind says flatly. “That’s what was agreed on.” What her father had told them, which comes to the same thing. The dinh of the Tet of the Gun, the dinh of all Gilead, did not need to consult three teenagers when making a plan to save their lives.

“We could be kissing cousins,” Cuthbert says, almost laughing. “We must be distant cousins anyway. Not much of a family resemblance. What say you, Alain?” 

“I say I’m not getting mixed up in this,” Alain says. He’s more Cuthbert’s friend than Rosalind’s, but she’s glad to have him there. 

“You always did have more good sense,” Cuthbert says. He does laugh now, and Rosalind would like to laugh with him, but there’s no laughter in her. No joy. Restlessness and rage take up all the space inside her.

Hambry doesn’t calm her, but it gives her other things to think about. Horses and witches; oil and treason. A girl with golden hair. Rosalind doesn’t know what to make of Susan, at first: a girl who will talk to strangers on the road at night and flash the skin of her long legs as she gets out of the saddle, like a trick-rider at a fair. Like Matilda Allgood. This is the sort of girl who was meant to draw Cuthbert’s eye. Instead, though, she draws Rosalind’s. Or Willa Dearborn, as Susan knows her. Not a gunslinger, but a girl from the Inner Baronies, unmarried and sent away to protect her from the roving bands of Farson’s cutthroats. It is difficult to remember to be Willa and not Rosalind. 

She still burns for Morgan Broadcloak, but the fury becomes less important as something else blooms in her. Affection like a flower in the desert. A rose from rubble and hard-packed earth. She thinks it must be a weed. She thinks that ardent love between women must be an ugly thing, to humiliate and control. She doesn’t want that for Susan or herself. 

And then Susan kisses her, out along the Drop, talking about threaded stock and how many head are being hidden from the Affiliation boys and the girl who came with them. (There’s talk in town about Rozy, too: a girl old enough to get in trouble with no man to look after her, bold enough to draw a gun on Eldred Jonas. Rough talk, about why she’s been sent here, and what might be done to keep her in line, should her cousin fail to do it. About the fact that she turned down respectable lodging with the Widow Nogales in town in favor of bunking at the Bar K with her cousin and his friend.) After that kiss, more than sisterly, Rosalind has to tell the truth. Or some of it.

“There was a magician,” Rosalind says. “Someone who knew my father.”

“Did he hurt thee, Willa?” Susan says. Rosalind can’t really fault her assumption. Susan is steeling herself against being hurt by a man herself, even if it’s a man who’s only selfish. Rosalind hates the thought of it. Susan is worth more than whatever Hart Thorin has agreed to pay for her, by any reckoning. And, though she tries not to think of it, the whole thing puts her in mind of something Morgan said on that last terrible day in Gilead. _Does she know that you were bartered away before you were seventeen?_

“She hurt my mother,” Rosalind says. “And I’ll kill her, when I go back.” Susan runs her hand through Rosalind’s hair. She hasn’t cut it since they left New Canaan. It’s almost long enough to fall in her eyes, and she hates it. Not for how it looks but because it’s another strangeness among too many others.

“A lady magician,” Susan says. “I wonder what makes that different from a witch.” Rhea of the Cöos does sound like a different kind of wicked than Morgan. Even so: they are both called to corrupt.

“The kind of magic, maybe, or the company they keep,” Rosalind says. “I don’t know.”

“Not a drover’s daughter, are ye?” Susan says. It’s not an accusation. She’s known in her heart already. 

“No,” Rosalind says. “But as you love me, ask no more for now. I’ll tell you the whole of it soon.”

“I do love thee,” Susan says. It’s only another day or so before the whole of it comes out — before Susan is calling her Rozy in the orchard and the oil-field. A few days more before they come together in the willow grove and pledge themselves to each other, give themselves to each other, for all that Rhea and Thorin might still account Susan honest. 

As things go well with Susan, they begin to go ill with Cuthbert. Rosalind is too much in love to hide it even if she wanted to, and the boy who would be her husband takes offense. 

“Did you offer her the jewels of Gilead?” Cuthbert says. “Make her a better offer than the Mayor could?” She hits him, and he hits her back, and they end up tussling in the dirt like a couple of children. They’re not children, though. The bad blood between them isn’t some trifle. Cuthbert goes off riding when they’ve had enough and can do no more than pant furiously at each other.

“He’ll come back to cry your pardon ere long,” Alain says. “And you’d better give it to him.” 

Alain, as usual, is right, but Rosalind doesn’t really believe that Cuthbert means it until she sees him meet Susan face-to face. _Rosalind’s love is my love,_ he says. He means it in more ways than one. Rosalind allows herself a foolish dream of happiness. Susan with the child she so dearly wants, that Rosalind can’t give her, and the burden of motherhood removed from Rosalind. Susan in Gilead, and Cuthbert with Rosalind on the trail. Three hearts entwined, like Arthur Eld and Queen Rowena and the Knight of the Lake. 

It’s only a dream, of course. It never happened that way. Arthur Eld had not kept faith with his two true lovers, and only songs for children pretended that he had. A girl with the name of Deschain should know better.   
___

Rosalind is bloody to her elbows and too breathless to wail. Gabrielle is smiling. Her eyes are open and she sees nothing at all. Rosalind knows Gabrielle is dead, but she holds her mother still, thinking that help will come. It doesn’t. It can’t. Her mother is a wet red thing crumpled in cloth on the floor and there is no more hope for her than there had been that day, five years ago and a hundred lifetimes away, when Morgan Broadcloak closed the door against her.  
___

The prioress at Debaria is tall and broad, vestments flapping around her like a ship in full sail. In her office she has a cat and a letter and an offer.

“You could stay here,” Everlynne says. “There’s a place for you, if you want it.” 

“I don’t believe in the Man Jesus,” Rosalind says. Everlynne leans forward.

“Can I tell you a secret?” She doesn’t wait for permission. “I’d say that no more than half of us do. Your mother didn’t, but she said more devotionals to Mary of the Roses than anyone else. All you need to believe is that there’s _something_. Something that wants us to succeed, to do better and be better.” Her eyes, like her cat’s, are inscrutable. “Do you believe that, Rosalind, daughter of Gabrielle?”

“I believe that Gilead has need of me still,” Rosalind says. 

“You might stop in Arten on your way,” Everlynne says, leaning back. Her chair is high-backed like a throne, and sturdy, but old enough to creak. “You could turn the town against Farson. Some are only for him because they hate your father. They think he killed your mother and had it covered up.” 

“I killed her,” Rosalind says. She feels like she’s fighting tears, but her voice is steady and her eyes are dry. 

“She doesn’t think so,” Everlynne says. She gives Rosalind the letter, and waits while she reads it.

“Did Morgan come to her?” Rosalind says. “My mother says — _said_ — that she came in disguise, as a woman in need of help.” Everlynne shakes her head.

“We wouldn’t have turned such a woman away, but none came while Gabrielle Verriss was here,” she says. Rosalind almost corrects her. It should be Gabrielle Deschain, but then… perhaps not. In death she doesn’t have to belong to anyone. “Gabrielle dreamed while waking. She was tormented in mind and spirit. I don’t doubt that she saw such a woman, but I do doubt that anyone else did.” 

“So she was truly mad.”

“Tormented, I said,” Everlynne says. “I know fuck-all about magicians, and that’s the truth.”  
___

Farson sweeps across the landscape like a wildfire. There’s only so much to consume. Revolution burns and bleeds but there’s not much left to be burned or bled after Gilead falls. Rosalind takes bullets from the pockets of corpses. Dead men and women both — in these last strange days, Rosalind Deschain and Aileen Ritter were not the only women to carry hard calibers. Needs must, as they say.

She meets a hunting maid in a place called Malverne, in the woods, and sits with her while the woman drinks a poison. The woman used to be responsible for the town, the last child of an old house, but most of the rest have left or died, and everything she brings down with her bow is already rotting away inside. The only unspoiled meat left is the flesh of the recent dead. Rosalind offers the mercy of a bullet instead and is refused. _Save it for someone who needs killing,_ the woman says. _I’m just someone who needs dying._

It’s a good lesson. She carries it with her out of the world she knew and into a stranger one, where time and direction do not stay where they’re put. She forgets the lesson in Tull and only remembers it again as she crosses the Mohaine.   
___

“No man of woman born,” the woman in black says. “You’ve got the incomplete works of Sophocles and McCartney but not the bard himself over here. I’ll never understand that.” Dark is falling around them in Golgotha. 

“I don’t understand you,” Rosalind says. She is tired all the way down to the ground, and hard-pressed to keep her wits about her, even with her quarry facing her across the fire. Or maybe she has been the quarry, lured patiently to this trap through long years. 

“Your mother was dying before you killed her,” the woman in black says. She spits into the fire and it doesn't sizzle. “She had a disease carried by men and suffered by women.” It must be clear that Rosalind doesn't understand, because the woman in black sneers at her. “She was made to carry children even after it became clear she couldn't. Your father, great dinh of Gilead, was ruled by his dick instead of good sense. He wouldn't leave her alone. I think that was all she wanted, in the end.” 

“Morgan Broadcloak didn't leave her alone any more than he did,” Rosalind says. It seems to her that the woman in black, the necromancer who signs her name as Walda o’Dim, both is and is not the magician she knew in childhood. 

“Morgan Broadcloak drove her mad,” the woman in black says. “But she didn't kill her. Wouldn't have.” 

Rosalind has her doubts. She is no longer a woman of solid convictions, even as she has spent years single-minded. It has whittled the rest of her away. The part of her that would have saved the boy without a thought had been shed in Tull, or on Jericho Hill, or in Hambry. She had watched Cuthbert die, and Aileen. She might not have been the one to kill Alain, but she failed him. All who shot at the figure approaching in the dark that night had shouldered the blame as their personal burden. She had killed her mother, and damned Susan Delgado by association. By loving her. Maybe it was the little bloom of affection she had started to feel for the boy that sealed his fate.

There is very little of Rosalind Deschain left after all those little cuts. The girl she was in Gilead, the girl who cut her hair and thought it meant something, would not recognize herself in the gunslinger sitting across from the woman in black. A gunslinger even then, that girl wouldn't have recoiled from her future. She might have seen something that needed to be put down. A hollow thing; a husk. But there is still her adversary, within easy distance and out of reach. There is still the Tower. 

“Do you want to know your future?” the woman in black says. “Never mind. I’ll tell you anyway.”

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: miscarriage, misogyny, mentions of harassment/bullying, implied sexual assault, domestic violence, adultery, violent sexual fantasy, brief internalized homophobia, mentions of consensual sexual contact between underage characters, violent accidental death, mentions of child death. (Mostly pretty canon-flavored unpleasantness, but our boy Stephen King has never been afraid to get nasty.)
> 
> I messed around a bit with Arthurian legendary tradition for background stuff — Morgan le Fay, Arthur's half-sister (and mother of Mordred) in our own tradition, instead fucked off with Nimue (Merlin's apprentice, and presumably Maerlyn's) and that relationship is used culturally to imply romance between women. (Navigating by Old Mother rather than Old Star is likewise supposed to be a culturally-established shorthand for taking sexual and romantic partners of your own gender.) The Knight of the Lake is Mid-World's answer to Lancelot du Lac, as I assume Rowena is its answer to our Guinevere. 
> 
> Ellen Water (briefly mentioned as a woman who fought for Arthur Eld) comes from my own initial misunderstanding of Child Ballad 208, ["Lord Ellenwater,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7ijrLp_FzU) also called "Lord Allenwater" and "Lord Derwentwater." I really wanted to believe it was about a female lord named Ellen Water, which is not the case. But, hey, anything's possible in Mid-World. 
> 
> Title from [a song of the same name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzc7zNnJLos&list=PLvgMFZ3TsddZAOVFUpaRkiGdXSPDf8PM9) by Alela Diane. I listened to her album _To Be Still_ a few times while working on this.


End file.
